May 2021
Author's Note: "Impossible Bottle" was written a year ago during Italy's two-and-a-half-month lockdown,
from early March to mid-May. A year later, we are dealing with a creeping vaccine rollout as we watch our American
friends and family gleefully celebrating their first and second shots. Many of our local parks are still closed. Middle-
and high-school students have been studying online since November. We have had no social life, or dinner out, for a
year. I have not gone beyond Rome for almost two years.
My 76 year-old aunt has been languishing in a hospital in Rome since before Christmas. She has had no visitors. One cannot even send her flowers. She contracted Covid-19 while there, has lost the use of her legs (from intertia) and is now being sent "home" where she lives alone in the fourth-floor apartment she grew up in. She cannot read English or use a computer, but this poem is for her. She inhabits the impossible bottle.
My second book, Still Life with City, will soon be released with Pski's Porch.
My 76 year-old aunt has been languishing in a hospital in Rome since before Christmas. She has had no visitors. One cannot even send her flowers. She contracted Covid-19 while there, has lost the use of her legs (from intertia) and is now being sent "home" where she lives alone in the fourth-floor apartment she grew up in. She cannot read English or use a computer, but this poem is for her. She inhabits the impossible bottle.
My second book, Still Life with City, will soon be released with Pski's Porch.
Impossible Bottle
Now that the jet stream of tourism has been stanched like blood from a wound, history’s monuments lie quiet as a postcard on a desk: Coliseum-as-cow-pasture, its ivory crown grandstanding between those horse-drawn wagons and shepherdesses dazed in a wood of columns of Pinelli’s vedute romane. Today, the selfies self-medicate. Echo of lion’s roar and martyr’s cry are all you can make out against this riddle of sky. The future is a phone call that won’t quite go through. “Operator, is anyone there?” you blurt, but reception is lousy, the earpiece hollow. You never get voice, presence, Ich und Du. I and thou. Just I, one meter away from every other I. Safety in distance. Danger in numbers. Chalk up the days since life seemed normal. Calendar etched black with Xs. Thank G-d, crank god, shipwrecked among stars, all of us afloat in the same impossible bottle. Toss us a link to the future & quick. It’s crowded and our world is going under.
Originally published in ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
©2021 Marc Alan Di Martino
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